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JThaddeus writes "The Associated Press reports that 'After nine months of tests, researchers in France have identified the head of France's King Henry IV.' Henry was assassinated in 1610, and his head has been missing. His body was dug up and decapitated during the French Revolution. Researchers found features similar to those in royal portraits, and radiocarbon dating confirms that the head dates to the 17th Century. Interestingly, 'Perfumers on the team used their professionally trained noses to identify specific embalming substances in the mouth used to hide nasty odors.' The results have been published an online medical journal."

I don't want to be dug up by scientists writing papers that nobody reads.

Anonymous cowards are dug up and put on public display quite often. Do something noteworthy enough that you get a fancy tomb and you might avoid this fate. Not that the rest of us will be holding our breaths for you to accomplish anything... we'll just be standing over at the edge of the graveyard with shovels. "Specimen of early 21st-century Homo semi-sapiens trollicus patheticus. Name unknown."

You've got options:
1. Get yourself cremated (or dumped into a volcano)
2. Make sure your body is dumped in a pig farm
3. Make sure your body is diced into pieces, and then dumped at sea
4a. Don't do anything noteworthy (preferably with the above)
4b. Do something so noteworthy that you are beloved. State that you must not be embalmed, make sure they plant some real plants above your grave, and make sure there's access for rainwater and natural light in the shrine that would be your tomb. This is a tricky b

The admins of the site have explained that essentially the idle section was mandated by their corporate overlords. By keeping the idle section as close to a "real" story as possible without totally violating the "spirit" of idle they are in essence maximizing the # of "real" stories on slashdot.

Well other than the fact there is no upward limit on the number of stories that can be posted to Slashdot. They really don't need to maximize the value of idle stories.

If they really felt the way you claim about idle they could post whatever junk to it and post good stories in other sections and then we could all just filter out idle in our user prefs. Right now I don't because often idle does have stories like this one I find interesting.

This reminds me of the Molly Maguires ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Maguires [wikipedia.org] ) , disgruntled Irish coal miners in Pennsylvania. They lopped off peoples' heads. I learned this story in high school in US history. Sometimes the severed heads were just dropped somewhere, and ended up in funeral parlors, who placed them in the window with a note, asking, "Do you know whose head this is?"

At any rate, my history teacher was at a funeral there, and asked the director about the story. He answered, "Sure,

After nine months of tests, researchers in France have lost their head and they went.... "Gee... Henry was assassinated in 1610, and his head has been missing. We have a head here that dates back to the 17th century. How many people in the 17th century had a head? I guess not many. The portraits show that King Henry 1V indeed had a head. So this must be his head." To put the last nail in the coffin... we will ask one of the 'Perfumers' on the team to take a sniff and if it stinks it must be King Henry IV.